MR. SMITH'S ASSYRIAN - DISCOVERIES.

I N a lecture before the Society of Biblical Archeology, on

December 3, 1872, Mr. Smith gave a translation and account of a recent discovery which he had made in the great collection of cuneiform inscriptions in the British Museum, of the Chaldean account of the Deluge. The resemblances—though with wide differences—between this account and that of the Bible were such as to attract more popular , attention and interest than would otherwise have been awakened by the subject; while to certain philologists there was the further attraction in the announcement that the tablet (of which three copies, though all imperfect, had been found) was one of a series of twelve, giving the history of an unknown hero, whose adventures, it was suggested, might bear some legendary relation to the twelve signs of the zodiac, and thus add new evidence in favour of the fashionable doctrine of solar mythology. The proprietors of the Daily Telegraph, emulous of their great New York contemporary, came forward with an offer of a thousand guineas to be expended in making further researches at Nineveh for the recovery of more of these interesting inscriptions, if the expedition were conducted by Mr. Smith, and the Telegraph supplied by him from time to time with reports of his travels and his discoveries. The Trustees of the British Museum gave their consent and leave of absence to Mr. Smith, who accordingly left London on the 20th January, 1873, and reached Ninevah and Mosul (the modern city on the opposite side of the river) on the 2nd of March. Another month passed before the arrival of the firman, without which the governor would allow no excavations, and even forbad—though Mr- Smith did not submit to this restriction—any visits to the sites and, ruins of the ancient cities. But at last he was able to begin.

Though most of Mr. Smith's readers will have been already- acquainted with Mr. Layard's fuller accounts of his excavations, carried on for a much longer period and with such wonderful results, they will find in the report of Mr. Smith's visit to the same places the sort of pleasure which comes from a second visit to an old familiar place of interest. He first began, as Mr. Layard had done before him, at .Nimroud, twenty miles south of Nineveh, and the mounds of which cover the remains of the ancient Assyrian city of Calah, which, from the magnificence of the still-existing ruins, must have rivalled Nineveh itself in importance, at some periods of Assyrian history. Here Mr. Smith found the trenches excavated by Mr. Layard still partially open, and the remains of the palaces of Shalmaneser II., Sargon, and Esarhaddon, with their vast courts, halls, and chambers, and the gigantic winged human-headed bulls and lions at the entrances, of which many still may be seen in their places, though some of them are familiar to us all at the British Museum. The details of Mr. Smith's excavations here are curious and interesting,—remains of steps, apparently to an upper storey ; walls of rooms plastered and coloured in horizontal bands of red, green, and yellow ; drains with bricks inscribed on the under side with a legend of Shalmaneser II. (B.C. 860) ; and in one of the rooms a brick

-receptacle let into the floor, covered with a brick, and containing six terra-cotta winged figures, closely packed, and each having a lion's head, four wings, one hand across the breast, holding a basket in the other, clothed with a dress reaching to the feet, and probably put there as charms to preserve the building from evil • spirits. But no inscription of historical interest was now found here, except the upper portion of a tablet of Tiglath-Pikser 11.,

the contemporary of Ahaz, King of Judah, whose name is found among Tiglath-Pileser's tributaries in another copy of the same inscription which was already published.

After a month's work at Nimroud, Mr. Smith returned to explore the site of Nineveh,—" a large enclosure, covered with low mounds, surrounded by the ruins of a magnificent wall, • about eight miles in circuit, and broken on the western side by two great artificial mounds, Kouyunjik, or Tel Armush, and Nebbi Yunas." These mounds (the latter of which is now crowned with an Arab village, and named from a tomb sup- posed to be that of the prophet Jonah) were covered with palaces and temples by successive kings of Assyria, in a fashion like that in which the Roman Emperors crowded

the Forum and the adjoining hills with like buildings. The excavations of Mr. Layard and of the Turkish Government brought to light the remains of the palaces of Vul-nirari (B.C. 812), Sennacherib -(B.C. 705), and Esarhaddon, son of Sen- nacherib (B.C. 681), at Nebbi Yunas ; while the northern mound

• of Kouyunjik is occupied by the remains of palaces of Sennacherib and his grandson Assurbanipal, the Sardanapalus of the Greeks, and appears from the inscriptions to have also formed the site of four temples,—to Ishtar, Nebo, and Merodach—for which there was sufficient space on a part of the mound where no buildings have yet been found. Among these ruins, in the Kouyunjik mound, Mr. Smith had been at work for a week, when (on the 14th of May), on sitting down "to examine the store of fragments of cuneiform inscrip- tions from the day's digging, taking out and brushing off the

earth from the fragments, to read their contents," he found one which contained the greater portion of seventeen lines of inscription belonging to the first column of the Chaldean accounts of the Deluge, and fitting into the only place where there was a serious blank in the story. Mr. Smith does not say precisely, but we suppose him to mean that this fragment belonged to another copy of the story, and not that it was the missing bit of the actual tablet of which the rest was in the British Museum ; for he apparently found this new fragment in the north palace, while those which he discovered in the British Museum, and of which there were three copies, were from "the Assyrian library," which we suppose to be that found in the south-west palace. The "surprise and gratification" of the discovery were followed by disappointment when, on Mr. Smith telegraphing to the Daily Telegraph what he had found, he was informed in reply that the proprietors con- sidered that this discovery of the missing fragment of the Deluge had accomplished the object they had in view, and that they declined to prosecute the excavations further. Mr. Smith, therefore, returned home, but the Trustees of the British Museum sent him out again in the autumn of the same year with a grant of £1,000, to make further excavations during the re- mainder of the time allowed by the Erman which the proprietors of the Telegraph had obtained, and which they now handed over to the Trustees, together with the excavating plant. This time ex- pired on March 10, 1874, and Mr. Smith was able before it had elapsed to make many important additions to the collections of the previous year. His narrative of his two expeditions is lively and interesting ; his adventures are amusing to read, and we hope

for him to remember, though they must have often been harassing enough at the time. The shabby tricks of the local Turkish officials —even in spite of the Erman and of distinct orders from Constanti- nople—were frequent ; he twicelound himself the bearer of letters which he was told would direct the next authorities to forward him on his road, but which proved to be intended to delay or annoy - him ; his excavations were hindered by various devices, the latest of which was a charge of blasphemy laid to his dragoman. Here is a specimen of the annoyances to which he was perpetually subject :—

"Orders were afterwards sent from Bagdad to Mosul to impede me on my return, to plaee a guard upon me, and not to let me leave Mosul without giving up half the things I had discovered to the Imperial Museum. I have stated that when at Aleppo I had sent to ask one of the irregular soldiers who attended me to meet me at Niaibin. On arriving at Nisihin, I soon found that he had not come, and when I reached Mosul I heard the reason. It appeared that on receiving my message, application was made through the French Consul to allow the man to come and meet me, and the Pacba announced that the man should be sent ; isnt when .the messenger's back was turned, the Turk . revolved the,orderrand said the man should not be.perraitted.to leave the town. It is this line of conduct which makes it so difficult to deal with the Turks. When, on my return to Mosul, I visited the Governor, he told me part of the difficulty, and declared that he should have to carry out his instructions, and he had therefore sent to stop my men from ex- cavating until he saw me. I requested him to reverse this order to stop my men, which he did, and then we discussed the questions be- tween the excavations and the Turkish orders. I declared I was favourable to Turkey, and should be very glad to see the Turkish Govern- ment have a good museum, and to that end I should be glad to show them a number of good antiquities, and assist them in getting others ; but I said I could not part with half my collection without spoiling it, and doing them no good. I said I was sent to collect fragments to com- plete our inscriptions, many of which, being imperfect, were now use- less; and I stated that if they took these fragments, they would not be complete or satisfactory inscriptions, but they would prevent us from completing ours ; and I asked them what would be the use, if they had one-half of an inscription at Constantinople, while we had the other half in London ? At this reasoning the Turks laughed ; they said they did not understand antiquities, and if I pointed anything out, I should point out worthless things to them; and they must have half of the things I collected, to make sure they had good ones. My visit ended without any satisfactory result, and from that time I was subjected to perpetual annoyance. I was refused guards I could trust, the Turks saying that by kindness I had won the men to my interest ; my movements were watched, a scribe as a spy was set over the works, and my superintendents were called up before the Court and charged with concealing the antiquities Before leaving the town, I pointed out to the Turkish officers who had charge of the collection I had given to the Porte a number of fine sculptures and a colossal statue, which I recommended them to remove to Con- stantinople, but they said they would not pay for removing them ; and I had even to give them a box to keep the smaller antiquities in, which I had presented to them."

The latter half of Mr. Smith's volume* consists of a more or less detailed account of the results of his excavations, which altogether

were carried on for less than four months. Besides a number of interesting objects, such as rings, seals, lamps, statues and

statuettes, or idols, and part of an astrolabe, he obtained more than three thousand inscriptions, or fragments of inscriptions, many of which complete the fragments already existing in the

British Museum, while others add to the previously discovered legends, lists of kings, astronomical and geographical records, laws, contracts, deeds of sale, letters, despatches, and some more of those bilingual tablets, syllabaries, and other lists which—as we explained in a former article in the Spectator—have thrown so much light on the decipherment of the inscriptions, by reveal- ing the fact of the existence of another earlier language than

the Assyrian, which supplied the written form of the latter with that ideographic element which has still to be distinguished from the phonetic, or alphabetical, in deciphering the inscriptions.

As Mr. Sayce says, in the preface to his "Assyrian Grammar," "The cuneiform characters were primarily hieroglyphics (like the Chinese), and were invented by a Turanian population of Babylonia. These in their several dialects assigned various names to the object denoted by the same hieroglyphic, and when the latter came to be used as a phonetic character, the various names became so many phonetic sounds ; every character, however, continued to be employed as an ideograph as well as phonetically."

Mr. Smith gives a new translation of the Deluge legend, in- troducing the considerable portions which he discovered as described above, and making some changes in those of which he had originally read and published a version. Among these is the

substitution of the name of " Ilasisadra " for " Sisit," and he points out that Hasisadra appears to be the Xisithrus of Bero- sus, the Chaldean priest who wrote in Greek a history of Babylonia, from the archives in the temple of Belus, in the third century B.C., and among the still existing fragments of which history are two accounts of the Deluge, which Mr. Smith gives for comparison. The coincidences with the Biblical .account—

though accompanied by great differences—are numerous and striking enough to serve as weapons of attack and defence which the dogmatists of belief and unbelief are equally tkilful in employ- ing against each other. We will here only observe that, whether the Chaldean or the Hebrew be the older legend, whether the former is a corrupted and degenerate form of the latter, or the latter a revised and purified form of the other, the superiority of the Hebrew—notwithstandingmome fine passages in the Chaldean —is marked alike in poetic and in moral and religious dignity. In the Hebrew we have no gods flying from the Deluge in droves like dogs, nor gathering like flies round the sacrifice with which the occupants of the ark celebrated their deliverance.

Our space does not allow of our giving even a summary of Mr.

Smith's account of the historical or astronomical inscriptions brought home by him. Many of them, as he says, have still to be copied and translated, and we may -add, studied and re-studied, before • Auyrian Discoveries; an Account of Exploratiotu and Discoveries on the Bile of Nineveh, during 1878 and 1874. By George Smith. With Illostrations. Loudon: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle. 1875. the value of these discoveries can be appreciated. The accounts of the astronomical tablets and of the part of an astrolabe found in Senuacherib's palace are very curious ; so are those of the directions (as they seem to be) for inscriptions to be carved by workmen over the various sculptures in the palace, such as "Line of battle of Te-umman, King of Elam," "Head of Te-umman, King of Elam," and others. Then we have a petition to Sen- nacherib to order repairs in the Queen's palace, a deed of sale of a slave girl to one of Sennacherib's palace-women ; contracts of sale of the time of Sargon, of which the body (as we understand Mr. Smith) are in Assyrian, while on the edge is a docket in Phoenician,—such as "the sale by Al-malek of the cultivated field," agreeing with the cuneiform inscription on the tablet itself; and other curiosities of Assyrian literature. Most of these new tablets seem to have come from that vast collection which Mr. Layard first opened in what he named the Library Chamber, in the palace of Sennacherib at Kouyunjik, and which Assurbanipal is supposed to have collected or completed. Mr. Smith says :— 6, My principal excavation was, however, carried on over what Layard calls the Library Chamber of the palace. Layard, who discovered the Library Chamber, describes it as full of fragments of tablets, up to a foot or more from the floor. This chamber Layard cleared oat, and brought its treasures to England, but I was satisfied on examining the collection at the British Museum that not one-half of the library had been brought home, and steadily adhered to the belief that the rest of the tablets must be in the palace of Sennacherib. In accordance with this idea, I found nearly three thousand fragments of tablets in the chambers round Layard's Library Chamber, and from the position of these frag- ments I am led to the opinion that the library was not originally in these chambers, but in an upper storey of the palace, and that on the ruin of the building they fell into the chambers below. Some of the chambers in which I found inscribed tablets had no communication with each other, while fragments of the same tablets were in them; and looking at this fact, and the positions and distribution of the fragments, the hypothesis that the library was in the upper storey of the palace seems to me the most likely one." And in another place he says :— " I have calculated that there remain at least 20,000 fragments of this valuable collection buried in the unexcavated portions of the palace, and it would require £5,000 and three years' work to fairly recover this treasure."

We would suggest that "Rolls House" would be a better name than "Library Chamber" for a collection of the character as well as extent thus described. And in conclusion, we commend this interesting volume to every student of comparative his- tory, for the valuable material it affords for that method of investigation.